Various systems have been developed to automatically fill large quantities of prescription bottles for use primarily in mail order pharmacies. For example, Charhut U.S. Pat. No. 5,208,762 describes an automated prescription bottle filling system. The system described in Charhut automatically fills, labels, caps, and sorts prescription bottles in accordance with prescription orders. Such automatic prescription dispensing systems can significantly reduce the time and expense required to fill a prescription, and can reduce human error inherent in conventional manual prescription filling processes.
However, a significant limitation of such automatic prescription dispensing systems is that a number of additional steps are typically required to prepare the filled prescription orders for shipping. In a conventional mail order pharmacy automatically filled prescription bottles are transported to manual packaging and mailing stations. At these stations, workers assemble the bottles associated with each prescription order and manually place the bottles into shipping packages. A literature packet printed for the order is then manually placed into the shipping package containing the bottles associated with the order. The packages containing the prescription order and associated literature packet are then sent to a manual mailing station, where each package is weighed so that postage can be determined. Postage is then manually applied to avoid damaging the contents of the filled packages.
A shortcoming of such conventional packaging and shipping processes is that they require a number of manually performed operations. These manual operations detract from the efficiency and accuracy achieved by the automated prescription filling process. For a high-volume mail order pharmacy, such manual steps increase labor costs and reduce the speed at which prescription orders are processed. Manual operations can also increase the opportunity for human error, which can result in improper packaging, labeling or shipping of the prescription order.
The automated packaging system described in Lasher et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,771,657 is an attempt to overcome some of the deficiencies of the conventional manual packaging process. However, that system fails to completely overcome the problems inherent in manual packaging operations. For example, a significant shortcoming of the automated packaging system described in Lasher is that the packages do not leave the system ready for mailing. The packages must be sent to a separate mailing station for weighing, determining postage and labeling. This additional processing not only results in inefficiency, but also introduces opportunity for human error.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a strong need for an automatic prescription order packaging system that can quickly and accurately sort prescription bottles into orders, generate literature associated with each order, apply a shipping label and postage to shipping packages, and load the bottles of each order and associated literature into labeled packages ready for shipping. The present invention provides these and other advantageous results.